Putting Faces to Familiar Names

Last spring, as part of Wellesley’s 150th anniversary celebration, the campus community was invited to submit proposals for projects commemorating the College’s rich and diverse history. Anna Mkrtchyan ’28 was one of the grantees.

Mkrtchyan’s project, “Founding Members of Wellesley: Visual History Presentation,” seeks to educate and inspire the Wellesley community by visually honoring key figures in its founding and development. “By displaying framed portraits and short biographies of those after whom buildings are named, the project aims to share Wellesley’s history in an engaging way,” she wrote in her grant proposal.

When Mkrtchyan first applied to Wellesley, she was waitlisted. Rather than feeling defeated, she spent a gap year working at her former school in Armenia, coordinating community service programs for middle and high school students. She also volunteered with American Councils Armenia and Project Harmony International in Armenia, supporting grassroots organizations near her country’s borders. Then she reapplied to the College.

“With God’s grace, I got in,” she says. “So now, here I am.”

The idea for her project was sparked when she was visiting a friend at MIT. “He was showing me the pictures of people the buildings were named after, and I thought, it’s sad that Wellesley doesn’t have pictures or paintings of people who stand at the roots of its founding,” Mkrtchyan says. “Given how unique Wellesley’s founding was—at a time when women were deprived of their rights of education—I felt like we should bring that history into the College.”

She plans to create some 20 framed portraits and biographies, and has begun painstaking research, supported by mentor Andrew Shennan, professor of history and provost emeritus, and College Archives staff. “The archival work is the cornerstone,” she says.

Mkrtchyan hopes not only to honor Wellesley’s history but also to address its early leaders’ contribution to the changing role of women. She wants to illuminate “the remarkable visionaries and progressive thinkers who played a key role in the College’s foundation, and created a space for women’s intellectual growth and empowerment,” she wrote in her proposal.

The scope of the task can feel daunting, she says: “I’m scared, because it’s a huge responsibility. But I’m excited, because I realize how much of an impact this might have in terms of preservation of history.”

Mkrtchyan’s interest in archival material is deeply personal. “My family are Armenian genocide survivors,” she says. “While we survived, we lost track of lots of family members.” She has traced lost relatives through Armenian and international archives and DNA records.

“At the end of the day, you have to remember where you’re coming from, where you’re going, and why you’re going there,” Mkrtchyan says. She hopes her project will help Wellesley along the way.